New Report Finds Nation-wide Racial Disparities in Drug Sentencing
A new report released yesterday by the Justice Policy Institute found that although African Americans and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates, African Americans are ten times more likely than whites to be imprisoned for drug offenses. In nearly all of the nation's large-population counties, African Americans were imprisoned for drug offenses at a higher rate than whites regardless of whether there was a higher crime rate, according to “The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties.”
The report concludes that drug laws are selectively enforced primarily on minorities and the poor. Researchers attributed disparate policing practices, disparate treatment before the courts, mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws, and differences in the availability of drug treatment for African Americans compared with whites as reasons for the significant racial disparities seen in drug imprisonment rates.